For your viewing pleasure…
Your correspondent is amazed at how quickly so many of his friends have exhausted attractive film-going options in this release-packed holiday and Oscar-promotion period. What’s a hungry viewer to do? Well, of course, there’s always television and cable; as Jim Emerson notes, many believe that they are eclipsing cinema.
But for those who crave the authentic big screen deal, there’s also the treasure trove of the past. For example, if one can’t muster the enthusiasm to head out this weekend to see The Guilt Trip or Texas Chainsaw 3D, one might enjoy…
Stanley Donen’s 1956 spellbinder was written by Peter Stone and Marc Behm, and featured Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Dominique Minot, Ned Glass, and Jacques Marin. Its score, by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini, was nominated for an Academy Award…
Witty, smart, and altogether satisfying, it’s here in its entirety:
(Email readers, click here)
And it’s available as a free download at The Internet Archive— as are many, many other worthies.
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As we salt our popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that the two greatest creators of hard-boiled private eyes, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, met for the first (and as far as anyone can tell, the only) time– at a dinner hosted by Black Mask, a magazine to which both Nabobs of Noir contributed stories.
Raymond Chandler (with his customary pipe) and Dashiell Hammett
This extremely rare photo of the first west coast Black Mask get-together on January 11, 1936 captures possibly the only meeting of several of these authors.
Pictured in the back row, from left to right, are Raymond J. Moffatt, Raymond Chandler, Herbert Stinson, Dwight Babcock, Eric Taylor and Dashiell Hammett. In the front row, again from left to right, are Arthur Barnes (?), John K. Butler, W. T. Ballard, Horace McCoy and Norbert Davis.